The Fruit Of The Spirit - Love Series

Today’s Key passage of Scripture comes from: Galatians 5:22-23

While you are turning there…

See if you can remember all of the fruits of the spirit.

Hopefully many of you can.

As we look in Galatians 5:22-23 this morning, we read…

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,

23 Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.

This morning we are going to look at the first one in this list

(1) Love

As Christians, The Bible is our foundation.

It is the final authority on all matters

AND

It alone should direct our life!

And if you boil the Bible down

To one core message…

To one central theme…

It can strongly be argued that

That one central theme

Would be that of LOVE!

In fact,

Love is mentioned 442 times throughout the Bible

That is more than any of the other fruits of the Spirit!

And that is not even to include the 24 times

when the Bible uses words like Charity

or other words which mean love!

AND when you compare it to

All of the other fruits of the Spirit…

Peace being mentioned 420,

Faith 336,

Joy 187 times,

And all of the others are mentioned 35 times combined!

When God gives us something in the Bible

It is for a reason.

Perhaps Jesus taught on hell

More times than He taught on Heaven

So that we would pay attention to it!

Perhaps we are told about LOVE

More times than

Any other fruit of the Spirit

Because

WE ARE TO EMMULATE

God’s Love for us

In a consistent manner throughout our lives!

Romans 5:8 teaches us…

8 But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

When God made all of creation

It was good!

God was happy

And so was mankind.

Adam and Eve were running around

And having a great time in the

Garden of Eden.

But then

They as the representatives of all mankind

Chose to break that fellowship with God!

They chose to do the opposite of what He had commanded them

Although He had shown them His love by giving them a beautiful garden to live in

And filling it with

All kinds of awesome animals,

Some of which were extinct before we were even born

So that we will never have the joy of seeing them ourselves

Despite all of that

They chose to break that fellowship with God!

But as Romans 5:8 tells us,

God commended, OR showed

His love towards us

He made the first move

And He has been showing us His love ever since!

Remember how things were when you were dating?

Remember that no matter how great a relationship was destined to become…

There had to be that initial meeting.

Then there had to be that initial getting to know you stage…

And finally, there was the

“I Love You” stage…

You know, the one where

One person or the other had to say

I Love you to the other.

For God,

Dealing with mankind may seem a bit like that.

Here He is,

The creator of all things great and small…

He gave us everything we could ever need

And then we reject Him.

Then, later on,

He writes us

A huge book

Fills it with poems and songs and stories about how much He loves us…

And now He is waiting for us to respond to Him!

God has told how much He loves us

So much that I could probably

Preach an entire year worth of sermons just on Love!

But I won’t do that. There are plenty of other

Things God told us,

So today’s sermon will have to suffice for now!

CHARITY

As I mentioned earlier

The Bible uses different words to refer to love

Sometimes as well.

If you’ve been a Christian any length of time

You should already know what is found in

I Corinthians 13

This is called the LOVE CHAPTER

It starts off in verse 1 saying

I Corinthians 13:1-13

1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

If we talk about how much we love others

And all of the wonderful things we are going to do for them…

And yet we don’t follow through,

We are just making a lot of noise.

If you want to make a comparison to that

It is the person who is always bragging

OR

It is that little yippy dog that

Someone has.

It can make all of the noise in the world when you

Come to the door and ring the doorbell.

It will sit there and bark in the window all day long.